An article in today's Huffington Post, "Leaderless: Senate Pushes for Public Option Without Obama's Support," http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... ,
opens with the following:
President Barack Obama is actively discouraging Senate Democrats in their effort to include a public insurance option with a state opt-out clause as part of health care reform. In its place, say multiple Democratic sources, Obama has indicated a preference for an alternative policy, favored by the insurance industry, which would see a public plan "triggered" into effect in the future by a failure of the industry to meet certain benchmarks.
The article quotes unnamed sources. It quotes a Senate Democratic leadership aide saying that everybody knows that Obama could get the holdout Blue Dogs to vote for the public option if he worked them. It says that "administration officials" fear that Blue Dogs in the Senate would not vote for a bill with a public option, and therefore oppose taking the risk.
The article says that "the president's retreat leaves Reid as the champion of progressive reform -- an irony that is not lost on those who have long derided the Majority Leader as too cautious."
The article says that on Thursday evening, after taking the temperature of his caucus, Reid told Obama at a White House meeting that he was pushing a national public option with an opt-out provision, and that Obama reacted coldly.
The article says that Obama's "political people" - they imply Rahm Emanuel is behind it - have convinced the President that a public option is unattainable. It quotes an unnamed "Democratic source" saying "If we're this close in the Senate and they're not helping us, I have a feeling they could screw us in the conference."
Yale Professor Jacob Hacker, described as "the intellectual father of the public option," is quoted saying that the trigger proposal in a betrayal.
Almost everybody who frequents this site in good faith is in agreement on some core of liberal ideas -- moving toward guaranteed health care for everyone, for example, just to go beyond the basic, choose Democrats over Republicans. But there are many of us who believe that the President is failing as a leader, so far. Then others of us think that those with this critical stance are influenced to think this way by biased, unsourced reporting.
Actually, those of us who supported Obama's election, gave him money, gave of our time to help him get elected, but dislike a lot of what he is doing, are not influenced by unsourced reports from Politico, or any kind of reports from Fox or whoever. And let's face it, MSNBC is clearly different from Fox, but they pump out a lot of garbage too. We take it all with a grain of salt.
What is costing Obama support among liberals is not the bad information put out by the media, and certainly not the rightwing attacks on him. It is his failure to lead.
Everybody makes their own judgments. It seems to me that Sam Stein does some really good reporting.
I take it all with a grain of salt. I don't automatically dismiss reporting that does not name its sources. Some of the biggest stories that ever break start to break because somebody is able to point toward the truth using unnamed sources. Without reporting concealing some important sources, by Seymour Hersch, Abu Ghraib might have been hidden much longer.
The reporting in this case is credible to me because it explains Obama's behaviour.
I believe if we want to get a good presidency out of Obama, we will have to provide the leadership, because he is not going to until we, the mass of people who are paying attention, train him to. He may be smarter than most of us, and he certainly has a lot more knowledge, but please keep in mind: nobody can be as stupid as smart people, and that is what he is proving now. And our collective wisdom may be greater than the collective wisdom of the political team he has assembled. Not as crafty, but wiser.